Revell’s poem is set in a train station bar and even includes details about the bar’s television. Try writing a poem set in a similar space that treats a similar theme: waiting. Like Revell, use details from the scene around you but also try to represent how the waiting mind thinks, remembers, and responds to its environment. See also Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room.”

What is the mood of Revell’s poem? Think about how he achieves this: circle or underline any words or images that contribute to the dominant mood. Now, try “reversing” those words or images. What does Revell’s poem sound or feel like now?

Pick up where Revell’s poem ends: using his last line as your first line, write a poem that either considers one place where you have “lived” or “another” place you’d like to.

Circle or underline any words that get used more than once in the poem. Which is the poem’s most used word? Second most used? Third? How does the recycling of certain words contribute to this poem’s mood or tone?

Though the opening of this poem situates us firmly in a place—“the bar in the commuter station”—its lines meander much farther afield. What other places does this poem take us to, both real and imagined? How does it do so? What cues (in the form of words, syntax, images) alert you to these movements?

Different types of “seeing” occur throughout the poem. Isolate every instance of “eyes” or vision: what kinds of sight does the poem want us to think about?

Ask students to think about or research Revell’s title. Have them gather images of both “the Northeast Corridor” and perhaps train stations along it (including Grand Central). As Stephen Burt notes in his guide, these early poems of Revell’s are “Rust Belt poems: poems of intense dissatisfaction … with a built environment that seems to speak, constantly, of empty choices and exhaustion, a place where all words and all structures point grayly and insistently to the past.” After students have gathered images, ask them to think about the poem’s relationship to these visual representations of despair, environmental exhaustion, and collapse. How does Revell write blight? How does the poem link environment to individual consciousness? Lead a discussion on the politics and environment of students’ own communities. What kinds of buildings, landscapes, and urban or rural decay do they see on their way to school or in their own neighborhoods? Have students photograph their community. Ask them to think about the connection between environment and memory, landscape and self, as they compose poems that, like Revell’s, demonstrate that “location’s inescapable.”

In his poem guide, Burt notes that Revell’s style has consistently changed: “To read Revell’s best poems in the order in which he wrote them,” Burt notes, “is to partake of the pleasure of self-reinvention, and to watch a man’s outlook rotate 180 degrees.” Ask students to research Revell’s career and compile a brief annotated bibliography of his books with example poems from each collection. What do they notice about his changes in style, form, or content? Use this exercise as a springboard for a larger discussion about development as a writer. If this class happens late in the year or semester, perhaps have students exchange groups of poems that include “early,” “mid,” and “late” examples of their work. What development or changes do people see happening in their own work and the work of others? How does one’s style change? Why is it important (or not important) to think about such changes? What changes and growth in their own writing do they hope or expect to happen? Students might write letters to their future writer-selves; or compose a review from the future of their Collected Works. Bring in examples of Collected Works so that students can trace changes and growth across a variety of poets.

Donald Revell: “The Northeast Corridor”

Chronicle of a poet's rebirth in his Rust Belt poems.

William Butler Yeats insisted that artists become their own opposites, assimilate what seems most remote. Otherwise, he thought, happiness would escape them: “all happiness,” he wrote, “depends on having the energy to assume the mask of some other self, that all joyous or creative life is a rebirth.” Donald Revell has followed Yeats’s prescription more than once, changing his style, his tone and his “mask,” with each decade of his 25 years of published work; the changes chart a man moving from gloom to happiness by way of multiple rebirths.

Each change in his style and mood reflects a changed locale. His early poems reflected his grim memories of the Bronx, where he grew up, and of industrial decline in upstate New York, where he lived as a young man. Soon after the poet settled in Denver in the 1980s, he became opaque, abstract, and mystical, as if his new residence demanded a divorce from places he had once lived. His most recent style reflects a happy second marriage, a newly confident Christian faith, and—not least—a move to the desert Southwest: his clear lines and joyful prospects match its stark, vivid colors and open skies. To read Revell’s best poems in the order in which he wrote them is to partake of the pleasure of self-reinvention, and to watch a man’s outlook rotate 180 degrees, from lost and disappointed to unlikely joy.

Most of Revell’s new book of prose, The Art of Attention, describes the style and the beliefs he holds now. The Art of Attention does, however, mention his early poems of the 1980s: Revell calls them, slightingly, works of “dogged precision,” cast in “dour iambics.” He also writes in that same essay that “Location’s inescapable.” Indeed, the 1980s poems reveal a man who often seems depressed because he cannot escape his locale: the poems are durable versions of a particularly Northeastern discontent. They are Rust Belt poems: poems of intense dissatisfaction with the poet’s own body, with his life’s limited options, and with a built environment that seems to speak, constantly, of empty choices and exhaustion, a place where all words and all structures point grayly and insistently to the past.

One of his best, and last, poems in this early style is “The Northeast Corridor,” a two-page poem from New Dark Ages (1990). Revell has written that this poem began in a bar called the Iron Horse within the old, grimy, unrenovated Grand Central Station, but it’s important to the poem that we don’t know exactly where we are: “the bar in the commuter station” could be any of a dozen-odd uneasy spaces to drink while awaiting Amtrak or MARC or Metro-North. It looks, to Revell, like a theater showing a failed play:

The bar in the commuter station steams like a ruin, its fourth wall open to the crowd and the fluttering timetables. In the farthest corner, the television crackles a torch song and a beaded gown. She is my favorite singer, dead when I was born. And I have been waiting for hours for a train, exhausted between connections to small cities, awake only in my eyes finding shelter in the fluttering ribbon of shadow around the dead woman singing on the screen.

The “fourth wall”—the invisible partition between audience and actors, which protects the suspension of disbelief—has failed; the stage is “open / to the crowd” and to the timetables. The drinkers are here not to have fun but to kill time. Once, this Northeast held genuine pleasures—the pleasures of pre-rock popular song, preserved in frustrating imperfection by a “crackling” television—but such pleasures are not part of his life; they could never have been: “my favorite singer” was “dead before I was born.” In such a place, the succession of hours, days, years, the forward movement of time, can bring nothing but trouble:

Exhaustion is a last line of defense where time either stops dead or kills you. It teaches you to see what your eyes see without questions, without the politics of living in one city, dying in another.

Suppressing questions, imposing a Lethean forgetfulness, this bar in New York City or Stamford or Baltimore becomes a kind of failed afterlife (as in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh): commuters are shades, paying homage to “Exhaustion,” too tired even to ask questions, certainly too tired to understand “the politics” (that is, the social and ethical causes) behind what looks, right now, like a meaningless life.

Few page-long poems have sounded more so. That first stanza contains few full stops at line endings (five in 16 lines), few places to pause and catch your breath, and even fewer suspenseful enjambments. Instead, Revell’s music is an intentionally grinding plod, ending line after line at the end of a phrase, and ending eight of 16 lines on unstressed syllables (“open,” “cities,” “politics,” “another”): nothing seems ready to move.

While waiting for this train, in this decrepit environment, a tired-out Revell dwells on that time before his birth when life in Northeastern cities felt authentic and hopeful:

How badly I would like to sleep now in the shadows beside real things or beside things that were real once, like the beaded gown on the television, like the debut of a song in New York in black and white when my parents were there. I feel sometimes my life was used up before I was born. My eyes sear backwards into my head to the makeshift of what I have already seen or heard described or dreamed about, too weary not to envy the world its useless outlines.

He is the shade in Acheron, presenting a nostalgia for “things that were real once.” He feels “too weary / not to envy the world its useless outlines,” viewing the present as a collection of line drawings, all black-and-white. By the end of this second verse-paragraph Revell seems to have boarded a train (perhaps during the stanza break), but though he is bone tired, he cannot sleep: instead, he feels as if he had already died, his eyes rolling backward into his head as his consciousness turns, with searing inevitability, toward the past. However fast his train moves forward, he cannot escape the feeling that he is moving backward, through urban history and through his own life: he seems to see, as the stanza continues,

Books of photographs of New York in the forties. The dark rhombus of a window of a train rushing past my train. The dark halo around the body of a woman I love from something much farther than a distance.

What is “farther than a distance,” more remote than a physical remove? It must be either the separation imposed by death, or else the psychological separation imposed when a woman says to a man “I never want to see you again.” The “woman I love” exists at a more than physical remove either because she has died (as Eurydice dies to the backward-looking Orpheus) or, more likely, because she is “dead to him.”

We are reading a breakup poem, a poem of nearly metaphysical despair, and a poem of appalled reaction to a used-up, rusted-out, exhausted regional landscape: a poem similar to, but much more intellectually ambitious than, Richard Hugo’s “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg.” Revell avoids Hugo’s local consolations, avoids Hugo’s moderately happy ending, and pursues instead a hallucinatory escape from any landscape or cityscape we could actually see. As the train seems to leave its underground station and chugs toward its challenging end, it also moves away from literal description, toward general claims such as the line with which the last stanza begins:

The world is insatiable. It takes your legs off, it takes your arms and parades in front of you such wonderful things, such pictures of warm houses trellised along the sides with green so deep it is like black air, only transparent, of women singing, of trains of lithium on the awakening body of a landscape or across the backdrop of an old city steaming and high-shouldered as the nineteen-forties.

The world as seen from a Northeastern train makes your legs hurt (“The world is insatiable. It takes your legs off”). The seats are cramped, provoking heavy drinking (getting “legless”), making Revell hunger for things and people and experiences he can no longer have. The attractive houses seen from a train must be only “pictures of warm houses,” as remote from the present as dead singers in pearled gowns. The world in which they fit, the world in which Revell may find himself satisfied, is an impossible and hallucinatory past, a druggy “black air.”

Revell could have ended the poem in a moment of gloomy, smoky nostalgia. Instead, it ends this way:

The world exhausts everything except my eyes because it is a long walk to the world begun before I was born. In the far corner the dead woman bows off stage. The television crumples into a white dot as the last train of the evening, my train, is announced. I lived in one place. I want to die in another.

The poet never reaches that place of “black air”: he hasn’t even caught his train! Though the poem has already portrayed a journey (and though it participates in a line of good poems about bad train rides—see Philip Larkin’s “Dockery and Son,” for instance), it has been stuck in the bleak bar all this time. As his train finally pulls in (or at least “is announced”), his last links to an imagined past disappear. Rather than conclude with the same harshly piled anticlimaxes that have characterized the poem thus far, Revell ends with an isolated, quotable line: “I lived in one place. I want to die in another.”

The Northeast Corridor

Born in the Bronx, Donald Revell received his PhD at SUNY Buffalo and is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, translations, and essays. Steeped in the work of Henry David Thoreau and William Carlos Williams, Revell’s poetry is “seriously Christian but not doctrinaire, mystical without setting intellect aside, angry over political matters without ever growing stale or shrill, and more often joyful than any other . . .